How to make it faster and at lower cost? B2B integration with semantic web services

Web services and service oriented architectures present a new approach to application integration. While it is reasonable inside an enterprise, it has certain deficiencies when applied in a B2B environment. This deficiencies apply to the discovery, invocation and composition phases, which require considerable manual effort. In the paper, we show on example of a mortgage simulator how these deficiencies can be overcome by applying-semantic web services. The application is compatible with the Web Services Modelling Ontology and makes use of an execution environment automating the processes of discovery, composition and invocation of semantic web services, enabling faster and cheaper B2B application integration

Using webcrawling of publicly available websites to assess E-commerce relationships

We investigate e-commerce success factors concerning their impact on the success of commerce transactions between businesses companies. In scientific literature, many e-commerce success factors are introduced. Most of them are focused on companies' website quality. They are evaluated concerning companies' success in the business-to- consumer (B2C) environment where consumers choose their preferred e-commerce websites based on these success factors e.g. website content quality, website interaction, and website customization. In contrast to previous work, this research focuses on the usage of existing e-commerce success factors for predicting successfulness of business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce. The introduced methodology is based on the identification of semantic textual patterns representing success factors from the websites of B2B companies. The successfulness of the identified success factors in B2B ecommerce is evaluated by regression modeling. As a result, it is shown that some B2C e-commerce success factors also enable the predicting of B2B e-commerce success while others do not. This contributes to the existing literature concerning ecommerce success factors. Further, these findings are valuable for B2B e-commerce websites creation

An open standard for the exchange of information in the Australian timber sector

The purpose of this paper is to describe business-to-business (B2B) communication and the characteristics of an open standard for electronic communication within the Australian timber and wood products industry. Current issues, future goals and strategies for using business-to-business communication will be considered. From the perspective of the Timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved business-to-business communication which is used both for building trust and providing real time marketing data. Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI) used to facilitate B2B communication have a number of disadvantages, such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic web which rests on the fundamental idea that web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication. This paper provides an ontology using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the Australian Timber sector that can be used in conjunction with semantic web services to provide effective and cheap B2B communications

Challenges and potential of the Semantic Web for tourism

The paper explores tourism challenges and potential of the Semantic Web from a theoretical and industry perspective. It first examines tourism business networks and explores a main theme of network interoperability - data standards- followed by technology deficiencies of Web 1.0 and 2.0 and Semantic Web solutions. It then explicates Semantic opportunities and challenges for tourism, including an industry perspective through a qualitative approach. Industry leaders considered that the new Web era was imminent and heralded benefits for supply and demand side interoperability, although management and technical challenges could impede progress and delay realisation

WebPicker: Knowledge Extraction from Web Resources

We show how information distributed in several web resources and represented in different restricted languages can be extracted from its original sources and transformed into a common knowledge model represented in XML using WebPicker. This information, which has been built to cover different needs and functionalities, can be later imported into WebODE, integrated, enriched and exported into different representation formats using WebODE specific modules. We show a case study in the e-commerce domain, using products and services standards from several organizations and/or joint initiatives of industrial and services companies, and a product catalogue from an e-commerce platform

Unlocking the potential of public sector information with Semantic Web technology

Governments often hold very rich data and whilst much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases. One of the great benefits that Semantic Web (SW) technology offers is facilitating the large scale integration and sharing of distributed data sources. At the heart of information policy in the UK, the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) is the part of the UK government charged with enabling the greater re-use of public sector information. This paper describes the actions, findings, and lessons learnt from a pilot study, involving several parts of government and the public sector. The aim was to show to government how they can adopt SW technology for the dissemination, sharing and use of its data

WEB service interfaces for inter-organisational business processes an infrastructure for automated reconciliation

For the majority of front-end e-business systems, the assumption of a coherent and homogeneous set of interfaces is highly unrealistic. Problems start in the back-end, with systems characterised by a heterogeneous mix of applications and business processes. Integration can be complex and expensive, as systems evolve more in accordance with business needs than with technical architectures. E-business systems are faced with the challenge to give a coherent image of a diversified reality. Web services make business interfaces more efficient, but effectiveness is a business requirement of at least comparable importance. We propose a technique for automatic reconciliation of the Web service interfaces involved in inter-organisational business processes. The working assumption is that the Web service front-end of each company is represented by a set of WSDL and WSCL interfaces. The result of our reconciliation method is a common interface that all the parties can effectively enforce. Indications are also given on ways to adapt individual interfaces to the common one. The technique was embodied in a prototype that we also present

Integrating e-commerce standards and initiatives in a multi-layered ontology

The proliferation of different standards and joint initiatives for the classification of products and services (UNSPSC, e-cl@ss, RosettaNet, NAICS, SCTG, etc.) reveals that B2B markets have not reached a consensus on the coding systems, on the level of detail of their descriptions, on their granularity, etc. This paper shows how these standards and initiatives, which are built to cover different needs and functionalities, can be integrated in an ontology using a common multi-layered knowledge architecture. This multi-layered ontology will provide a shared understanding of the domain for applications of e-commerce, allowing the information sharing between heterogeneous systems. We will present a method for designing ontologies from these information sources by automatically transforming, integrating and enriching the existing vocabularies with the WebODE platform. As an illustration, we show an example on the computer domain, presenting the relationships between UNSPSC, e-cl@ss, RosettaNet and an electronic catalogue from an e-commerce platform

Extended enterprise architecture with the FADEE.

Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi) is considered to be not merely an IT-issue, but also a business problem. This paper draws attention to the challenges companies within an Extended Enterprise are confronted with when integrating their systems. We primarily pay attention to coordination problems that may arise. To overcome these problems we propose the use of Enterprise Architecture descriptions. We discuss the powers of using Enterprise Architecture descriptions in integration exercises. It will become clear that doing Enterprise Architecture is no longer an option; it is mandatory. Furthermore, we present the FADEE, the Framework for the Architectural Description of the Extended Enterprise. This framework gives an overview of how companies can apply the Zachman framework to do Enterprise Architecture in the realm of the Extended Enterprise.Architecture; Business-to-Business integration; Companies; Coordination; Enterprise architecture; Extended enterprise; Extended enterprise architecture framework; FADEE; Framework; Integration; Problems; Research; Systems;